Wednesday, December 30, 2015

1. i don't care about Undertale. i don't like talking about things just because they're popular.

2. i have accepted that most people don't know, care, or understand how much effort or thought i put into my work. i have accepted my obscurity as an inevitable result of following my own path. in some ways, i'm fine with this. but i'm tired of being walked over and stepped on because i'm so afraid of being an unkind person to anyone. ever since i got into videogames, it feels like everyone wants to step on me, use me, take advantage of me and then throw me away when i'm not useful to them anymore. i don't care if everyone out there hates me, just so long as they know i do what i do for me, because i care about myself and having a positive impact on the world, not them or their expectations. i work harder, am more talented, and care more than almost anyone i know. i'm sorry if that hurts your feelings, but it's true. if you don't like it, prove me wrong.

EDIT: an addendum to this. i said this to someone who was upset by the above statement & this article in general. i hope, if you're interested in reading my work, you will consider trying to take what i said for what it is and not take it as a personal attack on you or other people but enter it in for a little longer and think about what i might be trying to say beyond that. i think that policy is generally a good one when entering into any kind of field of criticism. you'll have to take my word for this, but - i'm not generally interested in making personal attacks on people. there are much broader things at stake here. and if you wanna make me look stupid by me saying the above, then please do.

3. i think i finally know how Kanye feels now.

4. early this year i ended up in a bar in Baltimore after a show my brother took me to. a friend of his partner's, after learning i did videogame-related stuff, repeatedly started drunkenly exclaiming to me: "the indie games... these indie games aren't good enough.... they're not good enough!". i know more and more what she means every day.

5. this was as good of a year for videogames as i can remember

6. it still doesn't matter - videogames ARE not good enough. then i think about the most popular/talked about games of 2015 - A Japanese RPG fan-game with slightly cuter dialogue and slightly less annoying battle system (Undertale), self-indulgent 'games about games' that might be kind of neat in parts but are extremely reflexively insular to game development culture (The Beginner's Guide, The Magic Circle), a tool that may be super accessible but locked away and corporately controlled on hardware most people don't own and at risk of disappearing in a few years (Super Mario Maker), more Metroidvanias (Axiom Verge, Environmental Station Alpha) a slightly better iteration of the same bloated open-world soulless wander-fest that's dominated the industry of the past many years (Fallout 4), PG-rated lesbians in a bottom-tier Netflix miniseries-worthy story about the Pacific Northwest by people who've never been to the Pacific Northwest (Life Is Strange), a 3rd person multiplayer gun shooting game branded to look slightly cuter (Splatoon), a kind of cool FMV game with a daytime soap-level story (Her Story), soccer-but-with cars? (Rocket League). and then --- a game with actually socially relevant themes that everyone in their mother shit-talked because the developer has said mean stuff about videogames (Sunset), and a bunch of experimental games no one played or talked about (Rooftop Cop, Anatomically Incorrect Dinosaurs, ENOUGH, Strawberry Cubes, etc etc).

7. at first i thought people in games were just ignorant, or that it was just the cis white dudes who did this - but more and more, i think people in games (regardless of who they are) delight in only being interested in talking about games-about-games, they delight in feeling like they're experts and part of a culture, no matter how insular, and they delight in not talking about or exposing themselves to anything that might ever challenge that idea to its core. they delight in "comfort food" to the exclusion of everything else. this blog post, which exclaims "...but sometimes you don’t want The Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane. Sometimes you want to huddle up with a bowl of popcorn and watch, I don’t know, Buffy." as if it's some kind of revelatory statement to make about videogames. but there is no Seventh Seal or Citizen Kane in videogame culture. it's ALL Buffy - all of it.

8. the whole "wolf vs. the vampire" dynamic i was talking about in my 21st Century Digital Art Manifesto holds more true than ever. the old world (i.e. traditional labels, publishers, galleries) has to rely on predatorily sucking the blood of new artists, scenes, movements, and technological developments to stay alive and stay relevant. the new world (i.e. social media, internet content-o-sphere) is chaotic and cutthroat and relies on luck & ultra-conformity to survive. what's popular becomes so ultra popular it becomes a cultural meme (i.e. Undertale). what's unpopular (most else) becomes ultra-obscure. virality is the only thing that really matters. the old world has some of this problem too, but it also supports a lot more nuance in its discussion and has a much more well-developed dialogue that exists over multiple centuries - but it is extremely inaccessible to most & filled w/soul-crushing hoops to jump through to get your work seen as worthy of a deeper, broader look (that has about 1% to do with the quality of work itself). the new world is accessible to anyone with a computer is always buzzing w/activity but contains many glass ceilings - it cultivates a cutthroat atmosphere of ultra-conformity based on social codes and friendships and virality where most fall beneath the cracks. and even more than in the old world, they possibly fall through the cracks forever.

9. the theme here is - the world is becoming more and more unequal, and it's becoming easier to see how that affects everyday life. people are increasingly retreating into their own spheres and not listening to dialogue, not considering outside views, increasingly insulating their lives with click-baity junk food, are increasingly trying to be objectively "correct" instead of listening to each other, increasingly projecting their outward biases and anger as the objective truth.

10. as much as i love music, i think the music criticism sphere is worse than the videogames sphere, because at least many people in the videogame world will admit that most videogame writing is consumer-based and has never really escaped that. music critics have much more interesting art to write about and hide behind a thin veneer of cultural legitimacy as a place to hide their unchecked, poorly thought out theses and conclusions that almost always come from a place of weird jealousy and outright ignorance. or they write clickbait about pop spectacles that read exactly the same as clickbait about AAA videogames except with some college freshman level terms to go with it. people there understand that they have to like things other than just mass media spectacle, or other than what confirms their own sense of self and identity, but they still don't really want to.

12. social media has made me intensely distrust and be more paranoid of people than anything else i have experienced in this world.

13. here's for a world filled with complex people and not brands in 2016. here's for a more just, less destructive system for all people 2016. here's for a world where nuance is recognized and celebrated 2016. here's for no more escaping into "comfort food" 2016. here's for going outside your comfort zone and actually talking to people who differ from you 2016. here's for a death of "correctness" and a life for broader empathy and understanding 2016. here's for breaking down social media and corporate hegemony over our daily lives 2016. here's for no more externalizing your ignorance and emotional weaknesses as objective truth 2016. here's for no more escaping into the false legitimacy of old institutions 2016. here's for death to neo-liberalism and austerity 2016.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

i didn't want to talk about this in a public setting because part of me wanted to protect the people involved. i was trying to pretend it didn't really happen like i thought it did - that everything was okay, and that i could deal with it. that it was my responsibility. it was personal business after all and i didn't want to bring it public, because of all the other drama in the past that had been made public in the "queer game scene". it felt like it would just be petty, and i should just take the hit and move on. i didn't want other people to see it as just "more drama".

i also didn't want to make a post about this for years because all of the conflict that happened very messily and very publicly in that group of people a couple years ago and onward. i wanted to be a good person and let these things be as they are. but i finally decided that i need to do this for me. this is because i still have nightmares, and suffer from low self esteem and depression. i still feel really upset, and hurt about everything, and like i let myself go out of fear. i really can't seem to move on from all of this or escape it, and everything i do in the games sphere seems pretty tainted by it in one way or another. i want to gather the pieces back together from the wreckage of my life right and to escape with some sense of dignity and self-respect.

...

when i first moved to the SF Bay Area in 2011 from Ohio, it felt a little bit like a dream. it felt like i was stepping out of reality and into fantasy. it felt like i finally escaped a life of mediocrity in the midwest and had started doing something with my life. i was gonna set out on my own and make a career out of doing music for games. i was around other queer people, other weirdos and artists for the first real time in my life. it was so huge. and Anna Anthropy and her ex, Daphny, were a huge part of that.

but right from the beginning, things also didn't feel quite right. i wasn't the biggest fan of Anna's work or ideas about game design, but i was also curious to meet her. the first couple times i hung out with her and her ex, we had a lot of fun. maybe the second or third time i came over to their apartment, Anna said to me "we bought a present for you" and handed me a pair of black thong underwear. i honestly didn't know how to respond, because i had not expressed a desire to be sexually involved with them, and it didn't feel like it was a joke at all. but how often had i got to hang out with other queer people who were kinda famous for doing the things i wanted to do with my life? besides, Anna after awhile appeared to have a sensitive side which made me feel kind of sorry for her. so i kinda just laughed about it and thought that's what meeting new friends with alternative lifestyles was about (they were in dom/sub BDSM relationship and Anna was the domme). but i feel like those kind of interactions defined my relationship with them.

i felt super boxed in, not knowing the ways which it was acceptable to respond without starting a fight and losing friends, so i just shut down. i was amused but also creeped out that Anna had created a fictional character named Star Wench, a skinny blonde girl who was always being bound up or tortured in many different scenarios. there was a poster of her tied up and screaming in their living room that i kept staring at, over and over. and i have to admit, i like weird and disturbing shit and am not adverse to BDSM, so a part of me was intrigued. but i felt kinda like i was being seen as the analogue of that character, as a skinny blonde girl. like i had no real agency, or space to assert my boundaries within it. i wanted to have a distance, but i felt like that's the way i was being seen. and it seemed like much more an idealized fantasy and much less a reality. i felt objectified.

i always thought Anna was good at consent because of how much she made an enormous deal about it, both online and offline. it was her brand, her identity. i initially respected her for that. but i started to see that, outside of very particular contexts, she had no real boundaries. i felt uncomfortably sexualized around her all the time, and i know i wasn't the only one. i felt like the way she treated women she was attracted to was disrespectful and objectifying, like she was entitled to them and she knew what was best for them - better than anyone else. but it was also like she had to be superior to them, like she couldn't let herself be vulnerable to them at all. like they were wax figures or something, not real people. i guess that's part of what the fantasy of being dominant is about, but there was no dividing line between fantasy and reality here. it was completely how she saw herself.

she got a lot of pleasure out of acting like the rules didn't apply to her. she constantly bullied people with her ex on twitter and laughed about, and used her status as a plus-sized queer transwoman to her advantage as much as possible - both for favors and for money. granted, she had some tough times getting by, though i also think she had a lot of opportunities she crapped out on and often made excuses whenever it was convenient, and looked for ways to make her vision of reality appear to be true even if it wasn't. she also used it to take advantage of other people, like transwomen with far less of a following and support network than her. when she spoke on behalf of other queer transwomen, most of the time she was really just speaking about herself.

i felt like i was made to feel shitty about my body because i wasn't sexual enough for her liking, and i had no space to assert my boundaries within it. and i felt like i couldn't say anything because i was depending upon her for support - emotional, and even a space to live for a little bit. i lived with her and her ex for awhile when i didn't have another place to go, and i was extremely grateful to just have a place to stay. but it was in a weird kind of limbo, and i feel weird about it, even still. i wanted a friend and supporter and she wanted someone to flirt with from afar, someone to use to make her feel better about herself. she treated me really coldly and nastily and acted totally suspicious towards me as a result, like i was trying to take advantage of her. she would make reference to me having no real sense of humor and would make me feel like it was bad to like the things i did. like i was weak and a sad, unfortunate person she wanted to have nothing to do with. i felt like all of these were imagined projections she had of me, but i was scared of being homeless so a lot of her fears got to me. she and her ex made me feel like i had to follow their tastes and their friends, and my friends were bad, ignorant people who wanted to hurt me didn't really understand me like she did. i felt no space to be myself, and felt i had to maintain that act to other people i met through them.

for the longest time i thought she was really right - that she knew what was best. that she was trying to protect me in some way. and that i took advantage of her financially. that she didn't have to take me in at all and i should be thankful about being a huge burden on her. having guilt about needing to stay with her for several months because i would have otherwise been homeless made me feel like i couldn't say anything about my issues with her publicly without being a hypocrite, or very selfish. i thought she always had a trump card on me ever calling her out for anything. and it made me forget about promises she had made for financial opportunities that were broken and never talked to me about or apologized for. when i was still in a dire financial situation and really needed the money. it made me feel like i needed to be her friend, and support her even in tough times after she broke up with that ex. it made me believe it was really her ex's fault that things were messed up and that Anna was misunderstood.

but the worst thing is that is i feel like i couldn't even be her friend. i felt like there were so few contexts for me to express genuine concern or care because they'd be turned around on me to "why are you so awful?" if i wanted to say something about feeling sexually uncomfortable around her or that she might make other people uncomfortable, i was kink shaming. if i wanted to say something being concerned about her health and diet, i was fat shaming. if i wanted to express a disagreement about something she liked that i didn't, i was a negative person. if i didn't find something funny or was uncomfortable with something she did at someone else's expense, then i had no sense of humor. if i liked something she found questionable, she'd find a way to turn it around and imply that i was a racist. she had a lot of her identity invested in being an ally, in a way that felt objectifying of the people she was supposed to be supporting. i couldn't be a friend - she didn't want a friend. she didn't know how to have real friends. i had to be a follower. i had to listen to her lecture me. i had to subscribe to her views and support her ego and let her insult me to even get support. only recently have i been able to recognize the pattern of so many of the things she did as classic abusive behavior.

it really laid a mindfuck on me after awhile - i started feeling like she was morphing me into another kind of person. i felt like i lost a lot of strength and became totally weak and submissive in her eyes. i felt like it was the only way to avoid all the conflict that had been happening with her and her ex and others and be on people's good side. i felt entirely changing myself and personality would be the only way to reach her. and then i would have to be closer to her weird conceptual model fetishized ideal what a girlfriend should be - someone who was good at looking pretty and being objectified and maybe "important" to her but was ultimately there to be subservient to her and make her feel better about herself. but even that didn't work to reach her, and just made me hurt myself more and more by how much i tried to change myself. she wasn't comfortable dealing with real emotions.

even after i lived with her and her ex, i always felt that she was judging everything i said online and in public in the games sphere. i felt like she was always testing me, evaluating me, waiting for me to say something incorrect so she could dismiss me. whenever i did something i felt good about, i felt this sense of guilt wash over me. every time i wrote my opinion online i was afraid it would cross her, and she'd decide she hated me, that i was "gross" and that she was done with me like she did with so many mutual friends of ours. she took everything so personally and she burned through friends so quickly. but she had a lot of power, both in the trans and game communities, so it felt really dangerous to cross her. honestly i feel like the only reason she never quite burned through me was that i shut so much of myself off in order to stay friends with her, and she lost a lot of her power. but even then, i still felt a need to defend her position. i felt like this was a necessary sacrifice at the time because she was the only real family in the Bay Area i had.

i honestly think she felt jealous of me (and many other people as well) - that i had talent in a lot of different areas and i was open to meeting lots of different kinds of people. and i feel like she used that jealousy to keep me feeling bad about myself so i wouldn't ever challenge her ideas, because she felt deeply insecure about her own. so that i'd always be secondary to her, and accept that she was right and i wasn't, because she had so much of herself invested in being right, and i couldn't care one way or the other. and i felt like a total sucker for doing this, but still i basically just ceded it to her and let her feel that way, because i didn't want to create more drama or fight more about it. and it worked, and i began to accept her vision of reality even though i knew it was wrong. i really needed that support, because i never felt like my parents or family ever understood me or were there for me. she was also the one with all the experience, who'd met all the people and done all the interviews, and i was a naive, sad little girl who didn't know anything. so i felt like she must really know in the end.

and yet she was one of the saddest and most unhappy people i ever met. and i never really figured out why, but so much of my sadness came from trying to understand her's. she had so much invested in being "important" on the surface that obviously became less and less effective at masking all the pain underneath. i knew this from the beginning. but i felt so sorry for her as she begun to lose so many friends. i begun to feel like the only person i could trust with my emotions was her. i sacrificed a lot of myself because of that, and i sacrificed saying how i really felt about anything because i wanted to help.

and when i'd go to events, and people responded positively to her work and came up to her and hugged her and said how much it meant to them, i eventually accepted her view of the world as the correct one. that she really was as important and valuable as she made herself out to be. i felt scared to be anywhere around that was not around her, because it didn't feel safe. i didn't want to bring cognitive dissonance onto myself. she knew a lot of other people who were actually good people, and it made me feel like i must be wrong in feeling bad about her behavior, because they didn't seem to have any problem with it. so after protesting a lot, i felt like i was being a jerk and i shut myself off again, trying to support her and her work - especially, again, as she started losing support. she still had so much social capital in that group of people with so many people i respected that i felt like i had to keep supporting her, to support what was left of the queer community i had. but all those people all knew her on the outside - they didn't really know what she was like. and so i felt like i took on the burden of dealing with her despite disagreeing with her because it felt like no one else was.

i really thought i was better than this. that i could deal with it all and move on. that it was mostly all in my head, it was all just from past stuff i couldn't get over. that i was being judgmental because of my past trauma and growing up in the middle of nowhere. that this is just what you had to do to be real friends with someone, and to be a caring and kind person. i had a lot invested in being caring and kind, because of the way my parents treated me - like i was selfish and self-absorbed. so even though i resisted at first, i eventually became the easiest target. i became totally submissive and lost pride in myself and what i was doing.

...

it's still hard for me to come down emotionally from this. to accept that i wasted a lot of time and energy into something that was really hurting me. i have trouble having any respect for Anna's work because of what she did, the way she made me feel horrible about myself and way she treated other people. i like to pretend it didn't affect me sometimes but it really did, very deeply wound me. i think she is still a deeply mean-spirited, entitled person who believed she was always above the rules. when i did see sensitive sides to her it made me feel like i needed to keep supporting her, and that i could help her heal. and it's my fault for being so naive and thinking i could help change a person.

but i don't care about trying to reach her at this point - i already tried to several times, and i finally gave up after several years. i felt like she kept playing the victim, and blaming everything on her exes and people in the scene - really everyone around her but her. she had a startling lack of self-awareness. and i knew it, and i was deeply bored by it - but i stuck around because i felt sorry for her. and i feel a lot of shame at myself for doing that, knowing nothing would come of it.

i guess i just want other people to know to be careful who they support, and to educate themselves more on the dynamics of these communities. just because someone is big in a community and appears to be doing great work doesn't mean they won't use it to their advantage to hurt other people. if someone uses abusive language a lot of the time to make their points, that's probably not a good sign. just because someone purports to care about a lot of people and be an activist doesn't make them really capable of it, or capable of doing anything but being nasty and hurting other people.

i have plenty of anger at cisgendered white men for hurting me over the years, not to mention disrespecting my personhood and identity. but i also understand that i have to work with cis white men sometimes to achieve a positive shared goal. some cis white men have been really great supporters of me. and of course i often feel anxious around them. but to make something really cool - to show genuine empathy for everyone, you need a lot of different kind of people's help, and you don't always get to pick where it comes from. there's so much good out there, but the internet in this day and age has become so divisive, with so many people willingly retreating and pulling themselves back into their own groups. the amount of groupthink has grown so much, and the ability to escape it has become harder and harder. you end up only seeing the bad, and only getting people who reinforce your own biases.

i feel sick to my stomach being on twitter now. i only feel like the divisiveness is getting stronger. and i don't trust that people who are popular on there aren't just taking advantage of their status to use other people. no matter who they are. the more that i try to censor myself in order to support other people, the more i feel like those people just get angrier and angrier and i'm just hurting myself more and more. i don't feel like i can be myself online anymore. i don't feel like i have that space anymore, but it's so hard to find in the flesh too. and my feelings about this are coming out in ways that are really bad and self-destructive. my health has declined a lot in the past year or so, for one.

the language these days seems to become more and more violent, more and more favoring abusive behavior to get attention and exposure. i think this is no secret - i think social media, and our world, favors this sort of behavior to get ahead and get noticed. and it sucks. i know we live in scary and confusing times in many ways, and that a lot of people have pain. but think we need to be both smarter and kinder to ourselves and others. speaking out is important - being angry is even important too sometimes. but we need to find a way to speak out that actually allows us to grow, and be angry in a way that makes us realize and heal from the source of it. we need art, and compassion. we need to be able to acknowledge and face the reality of our lives, and be able to find a way to move on from it and still be human. that's why i'm in a creative community, and make music, and write, and do stuff with games. it helps me heal. we need to not let the angry monster inside us always do the talking. those who can't find a way to move on from hurt, just hurt themselves the most. it creates a toxic atmosphere for all of us. we need to all find a way to live with each other - and it is totally possible, and i've seen it happen many times.

right now i am more scared of some fellow transwomen than basically anyone else in my life. and that's a weird place to be - isolated from and distrusting of a community i wanted to be part of. and i don't really think that's internalized transmisogyny on my part - that's my self-preservation. that's recognizing those people i was around in my community turned out to be kind of dangerous and bad to be around. does that mean most transwomen are this way? of course not. there are so many different kinds of transwomen, and queer people, and women, and people of color, and cis white dudes even. and there are so many who also want to make a genuine difference in their life and make something positive from pain. i have met some of these people. and there is plenty of reason to be optimistic about these people. but oftentimes the people with the biggest platforms and power - the ones you're most likely to see from the outside on places like twitter, tend to be the ones who use it to their advantage, and at the expense of others. oftentimes you see the pain ahead of everything else, and the healing gets ignored. you see the negative stories make headlines, but all the positive work being done day to day is erased.

i just want to clarify - this isn't a thinkpiece. i'm not interested in trying to join the twitter debates about abuse or "callout culture" or whatever else. all of those are super abstract ideas that have no real resonance to me and take away from the reality of the individual situation. this is something that happened in my life. this is an intense personal thing that's hard to talk about. i still feel afraid to talk about it. it feels like everyone is either pissed off or checked out on these issues and doesn't want to have anything to do with it. it feels like i'm reaching hardly anyone with anything i'm saying anymore. but maybe that's ok, because i'm doing it for myself and not anyone else.

i'm not a perfect person by any means, and i have a lot of regrets. one of the biggest one is spending so much time invested in understanding other people's feelings and not exploring my own. one is letting other people's negative views of the world get the best of me, and not focusing on the positive. another is being afraid of confrontation and hurting people's feelings so much to where i hide my own. i'm still naive in a lot of ways. but it's something i'm working on. i've moved on from a lot of really bad shit in my life, and i plan to move on from this one too. i hope this situation is another opportunity to start being true to myself again. in the deepest despair there is always the best opportunity for positive change. and because of that, even though i really feel like i'm in the hole right now, i'm still genuinely optimistic about the possibilities. and i think other people should do it too. try it out - it might make you feel better.

these have been rough times, and i'd appreciate any and all support you can give. thanks so much. and thanks for your continued support online, in person, and on my patreon - it's what's keeping me going.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

i tweeted this out about a week ago, but basically: after this next month's QGCon and Indiecade (where i'll be doing a talk with David Kanaga about art and politics), i'll be leaving games. this has been a long time coming, and something i need to do for many reasons. the biggest one is that music has always been the most important thing in my life, but i never seriously thought i'd be able to make any kind of real career out of it for a long time. i have terrible performance anxiety and never really thought i had what it took to be a good producer either. there were other reasons, but a lot of why got into working on games stuff because i thought they'd make money. and of course i took an interest in game design, because it's something i've always been interested in. but over that time, my relationship with music evolved in a much healthier way. and i feel like i put had to put that and a lot else about myself aside when i moved here because i thought that's what i needed to be to be liked and successful in an industry like this. and also becomes videogame spheres really do demand of people involved in them to be forever pledged to them for eternity. and that has been extremely destructive to me.

the time i've spent in games has certainly been an interesting one. a lot has happened - it would obviously be impossible to summarize. i have been given some space to explore myself, for sure, and some people have been incredibly supportive and are what have kept me going over the years (and i'm eternally thankful to them). but outside these wonderful people, most of my experiences have been pretty awful and done a lot of damage to my emotional and physical health. needless to say, it's way past time for me to find a place for some healing from past hurt, and to be direct myself back on the right course - where i've always really wanted to go, in the end. a lot about my games career has screamed feelings of unhappiness and unfulfillment to me from the getgo, and i think that's just because i was doing something i've never been fully happy with. but i'm done with that now. now's a time to have more space to think about things without trying to be successful or be a brand, or spend all my time on the constantly anxiety-producing twitter. now's a time for me.

i'll also being moving out of the bay area to portland at the end of this month. there are many reasons for this, some of them personal. but basically, things weren't what i thought they'd be like here at all. it's expensive, it's full of tensions i knew basically nothing about and feel terrible about shoving myself into. i've had tremendous problems with the dynamics of social groups i've been a part of. i've felt a lot of selfishness here, the place is becoming unlivable in multiple ways. i have learned a lot and become a lot less ignorant about a lot of things, of course. i've connected to so many people in ways that would have blown my mind before. but a lot of it's been learned the hard way. i still go through a lot of stress and frustration about how everything went, and feel like a lot of my efforts have been wasted - especially emotional efforts i invested in people i probably shouldn't have been investing in in the first place. i will probably struggle with that for a long time. it's hard to let stuff go. i moved here with next to nothing and a lot of optimism and i'm leaving with much more than that and a lot of pessimism. hopefully these are things that can be shed over time, in a safer space. we'll see, i suppose. i still have some hope for the future, even if it's a very guarded hope.

--- SO HEY, since i haven't posted on here in forever, i figured it would be good to update this here blog on the happenings of the past year. the biggest thing, of course, is my Patreon - which is still my primary source of income. i still very much plan to do more with in it the coming months. i am eternally thankful to many people's generous support on here. without it there's no way i could have survived like i have. it's been a hard time, but i'm glad people have been there to get me through it. i hope you can continue to support me in the future ---

now, for more catching up:

~~~ first and foremost, i released some music this past June: "EP Year Zero". it's mostly older stuff, but i wanted to put it together in a nice place.

~~~ as always, you can always find updates to the most important stuff i've done on my tumblr (like art, and any other things), in lieu of anywhere else. especially if i'm trying to spend less time on twitter!

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post script:

i've recently been fixated on watching a lot of retro game collecting shows on youtube. one is called "The Game Chasers", which involves a couple of men from Texas and their cohorts driving around to flea markets and game stores trying to get deals and catch each other 'slipping', as the catch phrase of the show goes. the show also features lots of farting and references to each other as "chodes", for those wondering about the quality of the programming here. another is called "Flea Market Madness" by PatTheNESPunk, who shows up to flea markets early in the morning to hunt for good deals on games with his friend Frank (my favorite part of the show), an older eccentric completely disinterested in games. Pat, by the way, is also known for employing a "but it's about ethics in game journalism" argument on youtube in the early days of GamerGate. so yeah, that's kind of what you should expect.

as strange as it sounds, i've become weirdly absorbed into both of these. part of it might be that their kind of game collecting is something actually very familiar to me. me and my brother collected NES games and followed the much smaller online NES community back in the late 90's/early 2000's (tsr's NES archive, anyone?) when he first got a job as a teenager. at one point we had close to 150 NES games, several boxed. it was, of course, easier to find stuff then than it is now, with a market much more interested in retro and the idea of owning the actual, real deal. and i was always more interested in playing the games than he was - which is probably why he sold most of them off not too long after.

a lot of this stuff is still swimming around in my head, but it permeates around Magfest, where several Game Chasers episodes were filmed. Magfest was my first game event of any kind - it was the place to meet up with people i knew from back from my time as a remixer/community member on OCRemix, which was a very formative (and often frustrating) website for me in my teens. i have fond memories of the two Magfests i went to - Magfest 8 & 9 (January 2010 and 2011), even if i had already basically moved away from that community several years back and my reunion was relatively short-lived. i still have a very awkward and complicated feelings about that phase of my life. but part of it was really meaningful and important to me, even if i seemed to grow out of it all very quickly.

i still think back and i try to visit that kind of unpretentious enjoyment of games and game music - before i knew much of anything about indie games. before i went to GDC. before i did any talks at any conferences. before i somehow became part of a "queer games scene". before anyone saw me as being "important". i look back with sadness, because it was still really fun and important time to me. but there was also such a sadness and emptiness at its core i've never been able to get over.

IRC channels i regularly spent my waking hours in my damaged state after college in were constantly filled with people talking about how awesome last years Magfest was, and how they got so drunk, and how next year will be even more epic. people structured their entire lives around it. so many didn't really have an existence or sense of purpose outside of it. i felt very much a part of this because of that. i still never understood why, if it was that important to them, they couldn't spend more time trying to make these things happen outside of Magfest. but i don't know how capable of it they really were. these were people living for an event that only lasted three or four days out of each year. just one little burst to bring them out of the monotony of their otherwise boring existence. post-Magfest depression was always such an immense thing for everyone for a reason. you came back, usually with a horrible flu, back to your normal existence. and it sucked. it's hard to have such a high and have to wait a year again for anything approaching that meaning in your life. i escaped all of this by going on my own path, maybe, but i still think i lost a lot in the process.

the fact is: i cried hysterically at the end of my second Magfest. it was meaningful to me as much as anyone else. i felt like my life was nothing at the time, and i didn't want to go back to it anymore. so i ran away from that life and into games. and found that land of internet fun and games was not at all what i thought it was.

i guess this also just goes back to the whole culture of retro gaming. these discarded bits of consumer culture become people's church, their mecca. they become such an important and fundamental part of their lives. they become holy in every sense of the world. and the culture becomes much more about how this reflects on them and their identity, and what happened in the past, and endlessly trying to re-own and relieve every event of your childhood, than generating new culture or engaging with stuff critically or seeing clearly. of course it is a clouded, manic kind of excitement that's very infectious and extremely unpretentious. and that manic energy is a far cry from the businesslike seriousness of GDC or all the cutthroat competition and social dynamics and pretensions of indie game/tech spheres, for sure, but there is no moving on in the world of videogame fandom. the love becomes a weird fetishism that can never be escaped from. everything is put on a pedestal forever, never to be removed or changed.

watching a video by Pat the NES Punk on the Flintstones: Return To Dinosaur Peak (one of the rarest NES games), i see the emptiness of this dynamic exposed in its rawest form. Pat's videos are filled with weird "why am i wasting my life" jokes and asides, but this video takes it to another level, into an absolutely excruciating level of pathos. at the end he makes a plea to his audience to consider why any of this is even important or valuable. at first, it seems to be a joke. but then the video just ends and never goes anywhere after that. and in that moment it seems, very clearly, to not be a joke.

Pat poses a really good question to his audience that he obviously has no way of answering. in the end, if you're one of the lucky ones like him and you're a straight white guy from America with lots of disposable income - you can try and own everything. you can collect them all. you can search far and wide to try and save all these old cartridges from less loved fates. but you can never own what you really desire - to gain back your childhood. you can never really get back that feeling that you lost. it won't ever be like it was before. and you really never have space to discover yourself or move on from it healthily, because that's not what the culture is about. so instead of dealing with this trauma, we try to create bigger and bigger illusions and fantasies onto ourselves. we make it part of our world, hoping it will seep into our sense of being. but it can never bring us onto a path of awareness or clarity or fulfillment, where we can see these things for what they are and move on from them, happily. they will always be ghosts of the past stuck inside of us.

the thing i love about game culture is so many people try and preserve what creations were left behind by a ruthless, brutal market and bringing it back to the forefront in a passionate, sincere way. that's the best of what something like Magfest has to offer the world to me - an unaffected, infectious, incredibly excited exploration into the world of games (and especially the music, which i've always connected to so much). the thing i hate about game culture is there's no real creation, no challenging, no constructive criticism, no moving forward, no healing. the fundamental truths of games can never really be questioned unless you want to greatly offend people's entire basis for being. even as the industry moves on coldly and the world of indie games moves on just as coldly. and so it just seems, in the end, like the church for a lot of very damaged, lost people. and nothing i've ever experienced in games - even after several years of being involved in the "social justice warrior" side of games, has really challenged this fundamental truth for me.

so yes, maybe one day i will return back to making games. who knows? i still believe in the potential of the medium - there's so many directions you can go and that people are going in. there will continue to be the exceptions - the increpares or Tetrageddons. and i don't think my work in this sphere can ever really be done, for sure. but videogame culture - from the fans to indie games, to alt and queer games spaces, to game jams, up into the highest level of the industry, is and probably will forever remain very insular and closed off to outsiders. because of that, and many other reasons, i'm fine to have nothing really to do with it - or anything surrounding it - its conceptions, its critics, its creators, teachers, preachers and practicers - anymore.

“Actually, I believe my straight white maleness affords me some clarity and nuance to this issue that you may have missed in your article. (I mean, obviously you have missed it. I'm just trying to pretend to be nice).

1. Some people have an idea that videogames should only be one particular thing. Obviously you are not aware of this. When things differ from the norm, it makes some people uncomfortable. You must not be aware of this. I am very upset when you imply that a shitty Twine game is built upon the same building blocks as Skyrim, because that makes me feel weird about myself. It's one thing to say that an escapist world with shiny weapons and flying dragons that makes me feel good about myself is a game, it's another to say something with stories from the real world that make me feel bad is.

2. I think somebody once said that shorter is better, which obviously means this principle that I am abstractly invoking out of context is universally better. Especially because some people don't like things that are long.

3. Another part is when people have an attitude that places themselves up against other attitudes. This is wrong. When people are passionate about something, they ruin everything. EVERYTHING! Both sides are clearly wrong!!

Have you also considered my new take on non straight white male characters? Obviously you have not, I'm just being nice again. Once again, my straight white maleness affords me much more nuance to this issue. So let me spell this out for you as well:

1. There's a difference between calling any sort of attention to yourself, which is bad, and making me vaguely aware that you exist as a non straight white male in some kind of nonexistent postracial/postsexist/etc fantasy universe somewhere far in the background, which is probably okay. The first is obviously bad, because it makes me uncomfortable by calling attention to real world cultural issues that upset and/or implicate me and that I use videogames to escape from dealing with. The second is fine because you don't implicate my straight white maleness in any way with any of your feelings or background stories, nor do you acknowledge that they exist in any way (thereby also potentially implicating me).

2. Other people perceive that you are pushing an agenda of inclusiveness, and that makes them feel bad. When they feel bad, they lash out. I’m not saying I do this, though I do. But I will say that when a character becomes not straight white and male anymore, they more easily become a commodity - but they are not a commodity otherwise. That is how Capitalism works, according to Marx.

Then there's the people who are very unhappy with the state of the videogame industry. Or "baddies", as I call them (flippantly, of course =P). Sometimes the "baddies" like to suggest that there's something wrong with me if I don't believe the videogame industry should change. Obviously they are wrong about this, and uppity. This is an act of aggression on their part, which they obviously need therapy for.

Friday, February 20, 2015

note: this is an edited/updated version of a talk i gave at Indiecade East in 2015

i have to admit that lately i kind of dread the prospect of speaking at videogame conferences.

the events we gather in and the communities we work in, no matter how much we stretch and pull at their boundaries, are still all built around this ideal of games as some kind of super-medium, a kind of Eden or great pyramid that once we find the sacred formula to or reach the top of we'll solve the problems of all culture.

which is why we need diversity and new voices speaking out, right? it's about bringing all new ideas under the umbrella of this - the latest and greatest medium - the medium of the 21st century.

forget about us as individuals, we're all sacrifices on this great altar of "improving games".

this is the same kind of religious devotion to an idealized vision, by the way, that gamergaters will regularly employ to explain the motivation for their own actions.

and we know that, despite how much we try and push and pull at it, an event like Indiecade East is built around this ideal because that's what keeps games culture running, and the money and interest flowing. events like this predicated on preserving some kind of status quo by keeping us all under the umbrella of game culture - something that is profitable.

and that's not to say that an event like this doesn't provide us with a kind of community and a structure, and an audience to engage with that we might not have otherwise. that's what there being money around games does. but it's also self-destructive at the same time, because it breeds a very insular, closed-off way of talking and thinking about what we make - and it ensures we won't reach an outside audience.

which is why i'm taking this invitation to just say fuck all of this and try and broaden the conversation outside of games. maybe it's not worth trying to embark on this from inside the umbrella of a game conference - a place i'm assured will not reach an audience outside of games. but it's worth doing anyway, i think.

Tantalum—mined as coltan and an integral part of cell phones and Playstations–found itself in short demand, and the price skyrocketed ten-fold overnight. The “coltan rush” in DRC lead to a vicious fight for control over the mines, and the “black gold” they held. Farmers near coltan regions were forcibly driven from their lands, villages were brutally attacked, women raped, and thousands displaced. Those not forced to mine by the militia were expected to handover part or all of their payload coltan as a form of payment.

It’s estimated that as much as $20 million a month went to rebel groups to finance war efforts....Both the forced production of coltan, and the military power created through its production, would wreak havoc on the Congolese people.

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it's not too hard to trace the demand for cheap consumer products to civil war and environmental devastation. but in the case of computers and other consumer electronics, it speaks to intense contradictions many of us are living out right now - where easy access to all kinds of tools thanks to ever-present digital media is allowing many groups of people who were voiceless before outlets to engage and be heard publicly. but it comes at the expense of submitting ourselves to these commodities (in the form of consumer electronics) that we get to have no engagement with how they're made or where they come from.

...and these are built from the blood of people who don't get to have the level of engagement with these products that we have (if they have any at all).

but also, we look at images like this. how do we even look at images like this anymore? there might have been a point when these sort of images held an enormous amount of power to change minds, but now no one seems to know what to feel.

for one, it's a very clear testament the everyday human reality that comes from war. it's abundantly clear just from looking at it what kind of sadness this woman is experiencing. how exhausting and endless this kind of devastation is on people who have to live it. how hopeless it is.

in itself, that should be powerful enough to get us to start understanding and empathizing with the end result of our demand for cheap consumer products. but the problem is we've already seen so many images like these, de-contextualized, just in everyday life.

instead of looking at its face we just see an abstract idea when we look at it, or look at it defensively as if it is directly accusing us. a deep truth falls apart into a fragmented world of subjectivity and relativity. we come up with our own justifications for why this has to happen, or throw up our hands and say "well, what can we really do?"

and so even an image as powerful of this falls under the weight of a culture filled with feelings of confusion and disempowerment, inundated with other horrible images of suffering and destruction. and these are endlessly warped, repurposed, remixed, rearranged, reassembled to fit an incredible amount of purposes and ideologies. and they can become a meme and then lose a lot of their original context.

i think this speaks to a sort of failure of film in the 20th century - we thought that if we captured the image, straight, as it is (like in this image), then it would change people's minds: that a kind of documentary realness could strip everything away so that people would see behind the mask into the ugliness, and all its complexities.

there's a famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard, from his film La Petite Soldat: “To photograph a face is to photograph the soul behind it. Photography is the truth. And the cinema is the truth 24 times a second.” it's a hopeful, idealistic sentiment that captures much of the strivings of social realist art in the 20th century; that a thing like a soul is inherently captured in the technological medium. through this act of capturing reality as, we can see the truth.

what maybe speaks more to truth is in Michael Haneke's quote "film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth". because technology is a filter. it only presents us with one machine snapshot of a moment, not the entirety of it. and so what we think of as the actual, documentary truth as depicted by the camera might actually be much less fundamentally real than a subjectively depicted one that incorporates what is silently omitted from a "realistic" depiction.

it might seem terrifying that, through technology, we can never approach capturing the real truth of a moment. we fear that technology always makes truths wither away into relativity. but i think this ability to warp, and rearrange, and reassemble endlessly, instead of being a terrifying new distortion of the human psyche, can actually help us delve into much greater and deeper truths and realities than straight photographic depiction ever could. that layer of abstraction affords us a freedom we are often afraid to embrace. but i think, through embracing it, we find much more creative and expressive outlets to describe the truth of our situations.

digital media is inherently good at capturing the fragmented nature of our reality and spitting it back out as something we might not have ever considered before.

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in the San Francisco Bay Area, the arts are not infrastructurally supported. one of the reasons why is that the wealth is mostly comes towards young people employed by the tech industry, who don't feel the same sort of obligation to fund or support the arts as people in other sectors of business do. old wealth in places like NYC often carries material goods or creative treasures as a status symbol. being a patron and supporting the arts is part of that culture. but in the Bay Area, that patronage is much less present. investing is seen as an entrepreneurial. everything's worth is gauged by how much measurable gain it can bring its investor.

if the old conception of art and philanthropy was about, essentially, building a civilization — about funding institutions without expecting anything in return, simply because they present an inherent, sometimes ineffable, sometimes free market-defying value to society, present and future, because they help us understand ourselves and our world in a way that can occasionally transcend popular opinion— the new one is, for better or for worse, about voting with your dollars.

even through sites that try a patronage model like Patreon - which basically pays my rent and paid my ability to come talk at Indiecade East, by the way - you're not really investing to improve an institution or for social good, but you're investing a little bit in someone's work to see some material gain in the work they produce. even if the material is not swag-like bonus items but simply allowing the artist produce more work, the way the service feels more like a marketplace and a kickstarter-style consumer investment model than any kind of institution or community-building one. it's no surprise that many of the most successful users on Patreon have rewards systems for their supporters very similar to kickstarter. there are still implicit rules in place that come from the default mode of operation of a tech business model like this being within consumer culture.

i think this is because the language of consumer culture is what my generation feels most comfortable within. it's easier to sell the idea of patronage when it follows an already-established model. but i also think it's in part because tech believes they're already doing the work of providing the masses with powerful tools free of charge. it's only a matter of finding the ideal system, to make good aggregaters and provide tools where the best and most interesting things will rise to the top. everyone is theoretically on a level playing field, so there's no need for individuals to mediate.

but of course this is built from the great faith that tech places on "meritocracy". because art in these systems is seen only from the angle of how much measurable gain it can bring its investors, from audience numbers, to advertisers, to dollars. instead of some kind of higher-minded ideal of societal good, what comes is a massive reinforcement of the status quo throughout all channels. and so anyone who participates in a site like Patreon is expected to follow the model of its most successful users in order to find funding; the ones who tend to offer more consumer-friendly, middle of the road, unchallenging product. there is no institutional interest in users who might make bring less money to Patreon through more challenging or hard-to-sell work but might affect a vastly greater social good. artists hoping to challenge their audiences are simply not supported in this model.

this is frustrating partly because there is a history within consumer tech companies providing more holistic and powerful tools to artists - tools which often have now been laid dormant or actively suppressed because they don't fit in with the current "closed box"-style tech business philosophy.

i think the killing of Hypercard illustrates a lot of the hypocrisy about art at the heart of tech culture.

Hypercard was a programming tool for Apple computers in the late 80's and 90's. it was a bit like Twine in how it made programming accessible, except it was more visual and intuitive.

it was also, to be honest, much more powerful than Twine. Hypercard was well integrated with the Mac, it was full-featured, and its interface was much less piecemeal and clunky than something like Twine. it was as if Apple actively had an interest in making it as simple as possible for its users to look inside the computer and learn something new about how they work. some games you might have played - like Myst, were made with the backbone of Hypercard. yet nothing like it has been well-supported or embraced since then.

from an essay called "Why Hypercard Had to Die":HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place....(When Steve Jobs came back to Apple)...He returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.

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Black Mirror S1E2: Fifty Million Merits

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until... i began to see that i had commodified myself. ... i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. - humdoghttp://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299

in the 90's and earlier, the internet was often a place to practice your own identity how you saw fit and define yourself away from the confines of society (though admittedly only to those who could afford it and fit within active subcultures). even with all the changes that have happened to the internet over the years, in a way this has never completely gone away - but it's been increasingly colonized by advertising and business interests.

twitter you're leasing your personality, your brand out to other people to consume. and a lot of communities not traditionally supported within technology's culture have had a much greater influence on cultural discussions in recent years because of it. still, in every part of those discussions with friends and foes, you're being aggregated, and mediated by advertisers. these are super powerful tool for letting you get products that you like the fastest. and it's a super powerful tool of tracing popular trends and then finding ways to monetize them.

there's a lot of emphasis on networks like twitter or tumblr, at least in less professional spheres, about you being yourself and expressing yourself.

on facebook, you and your friends and your personal info become commodities and spaces that can be leveraged and leased by corporate interests looking to get in on your personal space. that's the way huge business interests are able to support and sustain it. most people are aware of this and will accept this for the benefit it provides you with connecting a vast network of active users, but the design of these networks also bring with them less apparent downsides to how that connection takes place.

these spaces are made to feel equal, and egalitarian, and usable - but they're not equal. there are many barriers put into place under the bland surface.

for one, we don't really get to define how interactions happen on these networks. on facebook, we're pushed to use our "real name" or else face deletion, and we're socially pressured into to using it as a space to have fairly shallow interactions with friends and co-workers. on twitter we can only have discussions split in 140 character bursts, and there are few effective tools for dealing with harassment. on tumblr, we can only reblog a post to comment on it, ensuring that substantial continued discussion gets bogged down and lost in the clunkiness of its reply system.

and marginalized people trying to connect with people or build communities are at huge risk being overtaken by toxicity. where there is little regulation, the loudest and most aggressive voices tend to take over and make spaces unsafe. people looking to use this chaos as a convenient platform to throw other members of those communities under the bus and spring themselves forwards are empowered. we've seen time and time again how much communities reinforce oppressive ideas within themselves, the question is how do we change it?

of course solidarity is important, but not everyone is coming into it with equal footing. there's been a lot of talk about intersectionality, but more than ever we see how crucial it is to have a more universal and flexible framework for empowering people that doesn't lie in our own individual biases. of course, the current way of connecting and organizing has its advantages but it doesn't leave any systems in place to lay down more longer term; or more abstract, less directly confrontational ways of addressing issues.

this is why reclaiming these spaces, and redefining the structures built into social media is more of an art than a science. because we are not equal footing, it necessitates creativity and different strategies. and it necessitates being acutely aware of their shortcomings.

honestly, it's a huge testament to the human spirit that we find new ways to relate each other and organize in the midst of these frameworks that are almost certainly not designed for it. movements like the Arab Spring, or Occupy, or the recent Black Lives Matter protests would have never taken off if not for twitter's ability to spread decentralized information very quickly to a huge amount of users.

i seriously doubt this was intention on the part of twitter. right now the digital realm is kind of a wild fight between the efforts to control and regulate the amount of power we are able to exert as users online on these networks vs. corporate powers tightly being able to mediate our interactions. and i think this speaks to the disingenuous way the tech industry uses the image and philosophy of its libertarian, open technology roots while also engaging in an active an effort to close the box and make online spaces into walled gardens.

the recent heartbleed bug was such massive problem because the openSSL framework that google and other companies depend upon is open-source and maintained for free. google doesn't use their resources to pay people to maintain it - they depend on free labor for people to do it for them. had they paid their own people, maybe there wouldn't be such a massive security hole.

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i wanna talk about something else that's been on my mind.

i have a tumblr where i post screenshots of odd videogame worlds (which is not very active anymore, sadly) and through that i discovered some people who were more committed to and better at finding and curating strange cultural ephemera than me: ulan-bator and fm towns marty (among others). the games they post from are often not in English and on computers that are not widely used or supported anymore. these are ephemera that might not be preserved on the internet otherwise.

a couple of years ago a video (NSFW) by a fairly well-known video artist named John Rafman came out for a Oneohtrix Point Never track used a lot of images from fm towns marty's blog without any credit.

fmtownsmarty has been doing what he does for years — finding games that most people don’t give a second thought, playing through them despite of obscure outdated technology and language barriers, and presenting them in an original way, with intelligence, integrity and humour. ...Then comes this fucker “artist” and cherrypicks his tumblr, juxtaposes it with stock internet shock imagery, presenting it on 4chan since I guess maybe he subconsciously realizes that’s about the level he’s working on. Of course 4chan thinks it’s really deep, cementing the impression of most people who don’t know where the actual effort involved comes from. Jon Rafman presents his work as gathering imagery from various fetish and videogame-sites on the internet, at first not mentioning any names. Noticably, the bits giving his video any structure, the final shot of the video which leaves the watcher thinking maybe some thought went into this video, and which in turn tumblr users have screencapped to yet again make gifs of, all come from fmtownsmarty.tumblr.com.When fmtownsmarty gives Jon Rafman a hint that maybe what’s happened here isn’t all as it should be, he gets a nondescript link in the description on vimeo to his imgur account, neglecting to link to his tumblr where he’s been exposed for ripping off fmtownsmarty’s work, neglecting to say anything about the extent of his “work” that actually comes from fmtownsmarty. Of course Jon Rafman gets seen as a pioneering artist for his slumming in internet culture, much like artists in the past have been “pioneering” for slumming in street art culture or “primitive” culture.

of course some tumblr image blogs are not equivalent to grassroots cultures, but the same dynamic is there. it's important to emphasize that re-appropriation which comes from the top down is not the same as what comes from the bottom up.

so i feel like there's this sort of dichotomy: of new media sprung up from this libertarian promise of freedom on digital spheres, where more people than ever before have access to tools and methods of distribution than they ever would have. but it's also where the spaces are largely unregulated by a larger ideal, and where work that tries escape the bounds mediated by consumer culture that forms the basis of this generation's way of thinking about creative work tends to be intensely marginalized.

and then there's the institutionally-sponsored art world, where art made outside the bounds of consumer culture is supported and there is a kind of civility and sense of mutual respect that comes from interacting in person with people. but it's a world that's crumbling. the kind of breadth or class involvement that these new forms of art might be integrating aren't respected, nor are they seen as relevant. this world must rely on sucking ideas out of these new media and new communities to keep their blood running - and often only do so in a surface, disdainful - classist and racist way.

this dynamic is nothing new, of course, but the form it takes now is a bit different this time. i call this dynamic "the wolf vs. the vampire".

these days, when you're making art in the digital realm, especially new or less-explored kinds of media, it often feels like there's no way to win. institutions will only support your work if you speak to their language or culture. and sub-communities on the internet are designed so that you have to shape yourself to fit into whatever the values of whatever subcultures that exist for them to accept or understand it.

i think a lot of work made today, especially in games, is defined by that dilemma.

the problem is often we expect these systems to mediate and solve problems for us, when in fact there is no easy way out - because it was never built into the system. if we want to envision a way out of this binary, we have to find ways to very intentionally go against the structure of our usual support systems to create one. but when we are provided with a basic level of support, it's hard to want to go against the source of that support and risk your livelihood, audience, and social sphere..

but then, of course, there are people who have nothing.

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South Bronx in the 1970's

hip-hop culture originated in the Bronx in the 70's, where it was an escape from gang violence and barely habitable living situations in the projects that were built there.

breakdancing and turn-tabling are kind of seen as media cliches now, but they came out of this culture. when we see them now, we see the image of them decontextualized, as if they are and were always media fabrications. we forgot that these are things that came out of people trying to create something positive from intense limitations from the environment they were in. we forget they come out of poverty, violence, and racism. we see the product that comes out of the struggle, but not the struggle itself. the act of extracting a product from oppression and then selling it back to people is what capitalism is intensely good at doing.

so, several steps down the line we have the abstract philosophy of empty materialism often espoused by popular rappers; one that is universal and aspirational for young black kids wanting to escape the same old cycles of poverty and violence, but also has a bizarre cartoon grandiosity that takes power away from communities. when these kids are inundated with images of rappers who've made it, the idea of making the best of what you have seems like nothing in comparison the prospect of larger fame, however small. this, in turn opens it's way for homogeneity and an inability to evolve outside the same toxic ideas. Questlove talks some about this in his series "How Hip-Hop Failed Black America"

but in making this critique, however apt, we risk missing out of the positive outcomes of this culture. how it addressed poverty, brutality, and racism in new and clever ways. in a way, i think the full context frees us by allowing us to move past seeing only the failures of a particular culture. if we look at the past as an opportunity for renewal rather than a static gravestone, we can use it to help us in the present.

hip-hop was intensely resourceful. in lieu of nothing else to power their sound systems, d.j.'s for outdoor block parties in the 70's would power their shows by tapping into the power from street lamps.

During the blackout, a number of looters stole DJ equipment from electronics stores. As a result, the hip hop genre, barely known outside of the Bronx at the time, grew at an astounding rate from 1977 onward.

in systems built around absolute unfairness, it makes sense that a thing like piracy becomes the great equalizer.

i think it's more obvious than ever now that things that are put out there in the world are going to be re-appropriated, re-purposed and remixed. in the age of easy access to tools and easy distribution, it's something we can do readily and with ease. regardless of whatever judgment you'd like to put on that, it's something that happens and will continue to happen.

where all barriers have been broken down between discrete forms of media - where games become novels become visual art become films become music, and back again, the rules are different than they were before. and making any sense of these new rules might be difficult, but it's also tremendously exciting. because the technology any user has is so powerful, there is literally no way to control and mediate what comes out of it. the realm of the digital is a virtual playground for anyone who can harvest its power.

but as we've seen, cultural change doesn't come from the top down. it doesn't come from venture capital, or non-profits, or particularly insightful talks at conferences. it doesn't come from a particularly well-built systems (which inevitably reinforce existing power structures). it comes from community. it comes from organization. it comes from reappropriation. it comes from chaos, strife, and struggle. it comes from changing the context, and the way that we think about and communicate with each other, and how we have discussions. it comes from the bottom up.